The whole of our cultural heritage is dramatically refracted in contemporary art where, surpassing its own boundaries, it passes into the universal. In their uninterrupted communication with the past but also in their critical and transhistoric synthesis, Macedonian painters, deeply rooted in their time and land, produce works of general and lasting value. This penetration into the past’s depths and investigation of the cultural layers has a large scope which encompasses the suggestions of prehistoric art, ancient Greece, Hellenistic cosmoplitanism, Roman eclecticism and Slavonic spirituality. Thus Macedonian artists, in their diligent search for their creative identity, tend to contemplate with an essentially up-to-date approach the relevant components of the whole Mediterranean and all of the cultural layers it contains without exception – Boris Petkovski notes this in his work Mediteranot i nie (The Mediterranean and Us).
Today, when we demand of art that it enable us to touch reality, when we demand of it that it restore the world’s scattered image, it is indispensible that it be open to the experience layered up over centuries.
Descending into the dark abyss of the subconscious where the deepest layers of the psyche lose individuality and, withdrawing further into the darkness, pass into the collective memory, Aneta Svetieva finds emotionally charged archaic forms.
On the battlefield where the angel and the demon fight, at the point where the world’s horizontals and verticals cross, where heaven and earth, past and present meet, in this crucifixion Vladimir Georgievski discovers a personal creative sign for the sum of human suffering.
Sometimes in the works of Macedonian artists different lands from a world full of gods appear, as a longing for a lost Arcadia, for the innocence of the first glance and touch, when for the first time the miraculous and terrifying world is revealed. In these works, as in Rubens Korubin’s pictures, the forgotten spaces of dreams are sensed, sunlit spaces where man and nature are still an inseparable unity.
Modern “nomads” like Simon Semov wander around vast spaces and distant ages searching for jewels to be incorporated into their works to shine unexpectedly, disclosing completely new meanings.
In immediate touch with leading creative achievements, like mediaeval Macedonian frescoes and the works of the great Western European art masters, Gligor Cemerski rediscovers art’s secrets, creating new mythical images for his time.
The complexity of this research induces Macedonian artists to find the grounds of their philosophical view of the world in the pursuit of the “contemporary myth”, a pursuit in which they surpass the borders of individual experience and endeavour to approach the sources of collective memory, Today when artists are united in their attempts to reach a direct and complete experience of the world and to fulfil their dream of distant ages when man was a part of nature’s great rhythm and when the world did not appear lifeless and empty, they turn their glance backward, towards the past’s eminent creative achievements and towards epochs like the Middle Ages, in which the deepest and darkest human secrets were revealed through art. In elucidating the past’s mysterious inscriptions, the axiomatic images that display reality’s complex structure are discovered.
Modern tendencies, the programmes of which are directed against aestheticism, give art back its ontological status. The abandoning of aesthetic subjectivism in order to reconquer the primal reality, the disrupted unity between man and the world, and the discovery of man’s deep secrets and of the entangled knots in the thread connecting man to the world raise the issue of a new attitude towards tradition.
There are still unsolved secrets. Deep in the ground there lies buried an insufficiently explored treasury which archaeology has still to discover. New discoveries will expand the knowledge of our past. Scattered multicoloured stones will be composed into new mosaics and new paintings will be found under the old mortar of the churches. Old manuscripts will be reread and history’s psalm-writers will discover new truths. New pages of Macedonian cultural history will be written and with admiration we will discover our cultural heritage, proud of its being an inevitable part of the world’s treasury of artistic and cultural wealth. In fact, what is still to be done is to discover the precious treasure buried deep inside us, and the effort of doing so will not be futile, for it is the most valuable thing we can give as our contribution to the world. Developing on the soil of a glorious and rich past, Macedonian culture may suddenly flourish again and, as many times before, give the world a new impetus.